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The Textual Realms of Patrick Modiano's Rue Des Boutiques Obscures and Mikhail Kuraev's Kapitan Dikshtein

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The Textual Realms of Patrick Modiano's Rue Des Boutiques Obscures and Mikhail Kuraev's Kapitan Dikshtein Studies in 20th Century Literature Volume 22 Issue 2 Article 2 6-1-1998 Travels Through Heterotopia: The Textual Realms of Patrick Modiano's Rue des Boutiques Obscures and Mikhail Kuraev's Kapitan Dikshtein Vitaly Chernetsky Columbia University Follow this and additional works at: https://newprairiepress.org/sttcl Part of the French and Francophone Literature Commons, and the German Literature Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Chernetsky, Vitaly (1998) "Travels Through Heterotopia: The Textual Realms of Patrick Modiano's Rue des Boutiques Obscures and Mikhail Kuraev's Kapitan Dikshtein," Studies in 20th Century Literature: Vol. 22: Iss. 2, Article 2. https://doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.1442 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by New Prairie Press. It has been accepted for inclusion in Studies in 20th Century Literature by an authorized administrator of New Prairie Press. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Travels Through Heterotopia: The Textual Realms of Patrick Modiano's Rue des Boutiques Obscures and Mikhail Kuraev's Kapitan Dikshtein Abstract Within contemporary prose, one distinct mode or paradigm that can be discerned is constituted by the texts that daringly tackle the dark, suppressed, erased parts of our history and mentality; however, they approach this task not by way of self-righteous denunciatory investigations, but by provocatively problematizing the most established everyday facts, by depriving the reader of the possibility of even conceiving any firm ground of the stable construct of an origin or a self-identification—historically and culturally. Their irreverent and playful deconstruction of the all-pervasive national cultural mythologies has mounted a powerful challenge to ideological constructs big and small. This article considers two representative examples of texts of this kind, which the author proposes to call heterotopic: Patrick Modiano's Rue des Boutiques Obscures and Mikhail Kuraev's Kapitan Dikshtein. It offers an attempt at defining this paradigm through a reading of these two novels, drawing upon Michel Foucault's usage of the term "heterotopia" for the purpose of designating the "other" cultural spaces of our civilization, as well as on Deleuze and Guattari's concept of "minor literature" and the work of several other theorists. The texts of the kind exemplified by these two novels are considered as an instance of successful partaking in the project of cognitive mapping, which has been proposed by Fredric Jameson and others as the positive political edge of postmodern culture. Keywords heterotopia, Patrick Modiano, contemporary prose, dark, suppressed, erased, history, mentality, self- righteous, self-identification, national cultural mythologies, ideological constructs, heterotopic, Patrick Modiano, Rue des Boutiques Obscures, Mikhail Kuraev, Kapitan Dikshtein, Michel Foucault, other, cultural spaces, civilization, Deleuze and Guattari, minor literature, Fredric Jameson, cognitive mapping, postmodern culture, political This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: https://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol22/iss2/2 Chernetsky: Travels Through Heterotopia: The Textual Realms of Patrick Modian Travels Through Heterotopia: The Textual Realms of Patrick Modiano's Rue des Boutiques Obscures and Mikhail Kuraev's Kapitan Dikshtein Vitaly Chernetsky Columbia University . et nos vies ne sont-elles pas aussi rapides a se dissiper dans le soir que ce chagrin d'enfant? Patrick Modiano, Rue des Boutiques Obscures' Umershii, palyi list lezhal riadom s golovoi Voshchera, ego prines veter s dal'nego dereva, i teper' etomu listie predstoialo smirenie v zemle Voshchev podobral otsokhshii list i spriatal ego v tainoe otdelenie Meshka, gde on sberegal vsiakie predmety neschastla i bezvestnosti. "Ty ne imel smysla zhizhi,-so skupostiii sochuvstviia polagal Voshchev,- lezhi zdes', is uznaiu, za chto ty zhil i pogib, Raz ty nikomu ne nuzhen i valiaeshsia zdes' sredi vsego mira, to is budu tebia khranit' i pomnit'!" Andrei Platonov Kotlovan2 Published by New Prairie Press 1 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 22, Iss. 2 [1998], Art. 2 254 STCL, Volume 22, No. 2 (Summer, 1998) There are coincidences, we are often told, that can unexpect- edly shed new light upon phenomena in our culture. In 1987 such a coincidence, perhaps, occurred in Moscow: the simultaneous publi- cation of two novels-Mikhail Kuraev's Kapitan Dikshtein (Cap- tain Dikshtein) and Ulitsa Temnykh Lavok, the Russian translation of Patrick Modiano's Rue des Boutiques Obscures.' It is entirely probable that the two authors, although they have gained a place of prominence in their respective national literatures, are not even aware of each other's existence; nevertheless, their texts engage a range of issues of great topicality for contemporary culture, and their respec- tive strategies for doing so display some remarkable similarities. They constitute what I here propose to call heterotopic texts. In defining a heterotopic text I am drawing upon several sources. Most immediately this notion stems from Michel Foucault's usage of the term "heterotopia" for the purpose of designating the "other" cultural spaces of our civilization, as outlined in the preface to his The Order of Things and further developed in his lecture "Of Other Spaces." Heterotopias, together with utopias, constitute the type of cultural sites "that have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect." But while utopias are "sites with no real space" that "have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society," heterotopias are spaces that do exist within society. They are, writes Foucault, "something like counter-sites, a kind of effec- tively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted" ("Of Other Spaces" 24). In "Of Other Spaces," Foucault sketches a typology of hetero- topic sites within the "actually existing" space-boarding schools, prisons, mental hospitals, libraries, museums, fairs, brothels, ships; however, the concept itself is arrived at through a reading of a liter- ary text, namely, a short story by Borges (The Order of Things xv-xx). Heterotopia, for Foucault, arises out of the heteroclite-a term used to designate grammatical or geometrical anomalies. While utopias "afford consolation," heterotopias "are disturbing," he writes, "be- cause they secretly undermine language, because they make it im- possible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle com- mon names, because they destroy 'syntax' in advance, and not only less https://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol22/iss2/2the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1442 2 Chernetsky: Travels Through Heterotopia: The Textual Realms of Patrick Modian Chernetsky 255 apparent syntax which causes words and things . to 'hold to- gether' " (The Order of Things xviii). A related notion of heterotopics and heterotopic space is ad- vanced as a semiotic concept by A.J. Greimas. Space, as a signify- ing form, can exist only as a result of projection of organizing human activity onto expanse, taken in its continuity and plenitude. Heterotopics, then, is the requirement for any knowledge and appre- hension of space or of a point in it: one cannot speak of this topos without postulating the existence of other topoi. Only then, stresses Greimas, can discourse on space take place (Narrative Semiotics 139-40).4 It is thus the idea of the plurality of spatial ontological possibilities, a foregrounding of this plurality, and a crucial empha- sis on otherness that the Foucauldian concept of heterotopia shares with the heterotopics of semiotics. The notion of heterotopia is further developed by Gianni Vattimo, who in his The Transparent Society writes of "a transition from utopia to heterotopia" as "the most radical transformation in the relation between art and everyday life to have occurred since the sixties" (62). In contrast to the unilinear, rigid organization of a utopia, it is the heterotopia, with its underlying principle of plural- ity, that, for Vattimo, dominates the aesthetic experience today (68-69). Thus, heterotopia becomes in effect an alternative designation for postmodern culture as such.' In literature, the notion of heterotopia was taken up most nota- bly by Brian McHale.6 In his study Postmodernist Fiction, he con- ceives of it as a "problematic world . designed . for the purpose of exploring ontological propositions" (43). However, McHale re- stricts his use of the term to the description of allegorical "other worlds" depicted in works of fiction, such as "the Zone" in the novels of William Burroughs, in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity 's Rain- bow, or in Julio Cortazar's 62: A Model Kit, or the Empire of the Great Khan in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities-textual realms where "a large number of fragmentary possible worlds coexist in an impos- sible space" (45). I believe the term can be used in the more general sense of textual organization proper; that is, the heterotopia is not that which the text describes but what it is-a condition when mul- tiple textual regimes come into contact to create a new symbiotic entity, a chronotope of coexistence that is simultaneously asserted and ironically subverted.' In this respect, it can be viewed as an alternative definition of one of the dominant modes of postmodern Published by New Prairie Press 3 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 22, Iss. 2 [1998], Art. 2 256 STCL, Volume 22, No. 2 (Summer, 1998) writing-a less restrictive one than, for example, Linda Hutcheon's "historiographic metafiction." Hutcheon's model of postmodernist prose is shaped through a foregrounding of the latter's self-awareness of both history and fic- tion being human constructs; this theoretical underpinning serves as the starting point for these texts' rethinking and reworking of the past.
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